We were playing, my father advancing towards us, a malignant look on his face. Was it my father, or was it a mullo with his face, coming up from Hell to take us back there with him?
2
It had all started there, with the hare, dead by the overgrowth. Thinking hard of all the ways in which I could put her brain and her blood back in place, and thinking hard about how I could not. Seeing in my mind the little beanie girl, and knowing that she wasn’t there any longer, and knowing that she stopped being there at the same time that Father did, and wondering why. She used to dye her hair blue, and I did as well. What was her name?
Now, in my pod up among the stars, I benefit from all the scientific and technological advances that the Upper Settlement can offer a surfacer like myself. Miracles are performed in the ring; everybody knows that. Would it be possible, here, to put it all back? As soon as I arrived up here, things progressed quickly. We were sorted like cattle, and I am carrying the biggest possible prize. And yet, and yet. I doubt they could do it themselves: put it all back together, bring the dead back to life, prevent from dying that which should not live.
Here, I dream that there is some problem with the delivery, or the child moves to a difficult position. I suspect they will cut me in half to get her out if that happens.
The hare had brought back those images of Father, of the beanie girl and me playing together, scenes perhaps seen in a dream, or that took place many years back. I went back again and again for several weeks to see the corpse, forgotten among the branches, for some reason untouched by the other creatures. Perhaps some of her striking fur possessed an unexpected poisonous quality. No maggots crawled through her orange fur. Instead, a liquid mass of yellow and pink covered the open wound, and the rotten flesh that had somehow gushed over the grass looked sticky.
I felt a strange comfort in her presence. The sweet smell of rot did not displease me, not really. I would pretend to gag at it; otherwise I could imagine the beanie youngsters who worked for us would single me out as ‘odd’, or ‘fancy’. They might laugh at me as they laughed at Mother. But death was as natural as living, I thought. Perhaps there was a bit of swimmer in me.
* * *
I was often sent to harvest with them, the beanie youngsters. We collected nuts, leaves, flowers. They were not children, but not fully grown up either. They existed in that indeterminate time of understanding cruelty, of understanding pain. And, after the Delivery Act, of understanding that I was not better than them any longer.
First, there were the elegant techies, then their servants, the beanies, and lastly those on the Upper Settlement, the ringers, lording over us all. The shuvaníes, like Savina, did not even count. No one mentioned them, worried about them, either their fears or their desires. They occupied a liminal space within our society, at once part of it and outsiders. They kept themselves to themselves, and were only part of a household if they served a family; and they would not serve anyone but the most aristocratic and old ones. Employing one was a mark of high distinction. Hence, they were both inside and outside of our lives, neither believers nor followers of the condoned doctrine.
After the Act was passed and ratified, we were all equal. Or were we? With the new knowledge that we were no better than them, other ideas awoke in the beanie brains of my harvest companions. They knew that our clothes were shabby, that our only vehicle had been repaired a hundred times, and that it didn’t hover over the road anymore. It needed to go on its six wheels. This was a problem for us: the roads into Old Town were not accessible at that point. Once the hover system started failing, we were cut off from the world. You would never see another vehicle; you would never see a drone from the ring descending with its annoying buzz, as unwelcome as a queen butterfly; you would never see the ring itself. This absence of the Upper Settlement from our sky made everything more unreal if I was ever taken into town. For I was so little used to seeing the white translucent structure, all lights and shiny colours orbiting around itself in the middle of the night, that I could not quite believe that it was up there. The answer to my childish question would in turn depend on who I was asking:
‘Mommy, is the ring real?’
‘Of course it’s real. Mr Vanlow has lived there.’ This was our new neighbour. ‘Many people live there. You yourself have some family up there: one of my second cousins managed to emigrate years ago.’
‘Savina, is the ring real?’
‘Real? What do you mean, real? What is real, child? Is this house real, or the forest, or the ocean that we can never see behind the wall real?’
The truth was that there were many things in our world that were not part of our life, of our existence, up in the sierra. It hit Mother hardest. For she was the one who needed to come down to the coast regularly; she was the one who needed contact with the water. They were right to insult her, the beanie children. She had been a swimmer, and a swimmer is always a swimmer. I wondered if she knew the truth: that it was the beanie children themselves who had tampered with our hovering vehicle, so we would be trapped there on purpose. I had caught them doing it, two scruffy girls, no bigger than me, crouching next to it, and a smaller boy keeping lookout. I did not understand what they were doing, so I kept hidden behind some bushes. They had opened some small latch on the side, and were tampering with the mechanism, with a stick of all things. Afterwards, the vehicle did not fly anymore. It was only years later that I understood one thing: those children could not have known by themselves where to find the circuit that needed to be tampered with, so it stands to reason that they were given precise instructions by adults. The realisation sent shivers up my spine.
But that was not all: those children knew cruelty. I saw them often, looking at her, while she sat on the balcony. Mother, lost in her dreams, thinking of the distant ocean. They would call her names, shout at her that she was a swimmer, but I was still made to work with them, for no one should harvest on their own, letting the forest decide whether to come for you or not.
A strange tension surrounded our interactions. They did not miss an opportunity to remind me that my mother could be a techie, but that my father was not, and that therefore I was nothing more than some trash caught in the middle.
On a particularly hot morning, they played their most sophisticated trick on me. I went into the shed to replace my shields. They were not cutting properly, and I was halfway through my task of clearing a bed. The shed we had in Gobarí was round, and white. It had built-in shelves filled with all sorts of tools and bits and pieces: odd bits of rope, opened seed packets, dirty tools put away without any care, bamboo sticks prepared for planting, empty pots. It was always warm in there, but today I found it cool and fresh inside, so I pushed the door a little, to keep the heat out. The little structure could only be locked from the outside. In theory, it was to prevent animals from going inside at night. Sometimes servants, beanies, had been locked in as a punishment. Of course, we could not do that anymore. After the Act, the ones that remained with us expected now to be paid with credit; I wondered how we were going to do it. But I wondered from afar, not really worrying. Not fully grown up yet.
I felt safe there; I didn’t want to go back, face them, to have to bend down to pull the wild randunes, cut out the leaves from the bed in preparation for planting, all the tiring little tasks I had undertaken that year. I bought myself some time inspecting the tools. There were long spears, hanging from the walls. We used them to cut the upper palm leaves. For other things as well.
Sometimes we got trapped out there, in Gobarí. The hovering vehicles didn’t work so well in the forest; the HivePods couldn’t find any signals. Sometimes we were cut off, and the spears could clear a path, if needed. We went long periods without using them, but that thought was not reassuring, for it surely meant that the time to do so again was nearly on us.
A bell rang somewhere. It could be that it was time to eat. Was it really time to eat? I remember thinking. I sometimes went into vacant moments, fugue states, when I lost
the sense of time. The bell could also be signalling that the forest had moved, ever so slightly, or had swallowed one of us up. Unlikely.
At some point I walked confidently towards the door of the shed to get out, but found it locked. This was unexpected. I moved the handle up and down with all my might. It didn’t open magically, of course. And I knew no shuvaní prayer that would help me. Only then did I notice how small the shed was, how its walls seemed to close over my head, not leaving a lot of space for breathing.
Would I die there?
I started panting.
It took a minute, but eventually I recognised what was happening: I was having one of my episodes.
To know this was comforting; at least I knew this was not death, my heart failing. This was simply out-of-control fear. But knowing that did not ease the feeling of dread, did not stop me from actually going through it. I would have to go through it.
This was a battle between my irrational fear and the rational notion of knowing exactly what was happening to me. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t react. Eventually, I found the willpower to advance a couple of steps and crouch by the wall, under the shelves, folding my body over itself. I hugged my knees. And I sat to wait it out. I was insanely proud of having taken those two steps, of deciding to crouch down and hug my knees, and of being capable of putting my decision into action.
Outside, the dark was growing. Someone would have noticed my absence by now. Or would they think the forest had taken me? If that were the case, then no one would bother looking for me.
I had had similar episodes before, but this one hit me particularly hard. What was I meant to do? I tried to remember. Something about retreating mentally to your ‘safe place’. We were encouraged to create those. I had not undergone the formal training, but any of us could in theory be sent in a vessel up to the sky. A ‘safe place’ was meant to be a useful thing to have. Even after knowing all your life that you were meant to go there, the shock of space could hit you, I could understand that. The episode made my chest feel heavy, clenched; I could not settle on a place of security, a calming idea. I had read the guide to the NEST programme that we kept at home several times, and I had tried to think of a safe place. What would that be for me? Gobarí, perhaps? The forest? The pond? The pond. That was it. I imagined that my two feet advanced down the little shore, advanced until the water reached my waist, and that I took a plunge below the yellowy surface. I would resurface feeling refreshed, clean and new, and all my worries would be gone, and my solitude would be a distant memory.
That did it. Unexpectedly, once I felt calm, another image sprang to mind: the dead hare, her dark orange fur and her yellow gluey brains. Inside the shed, far away from its body, decomposing near the pond, I thought deeply of her, remembered her sickly sweet rotting smell. Willingly, it seemed; quite willingly.
I have felt this, I thought; I have experienced all this, this exact combination of events. A strong sense of déjà vu overtook my brain at that moment, as though I were drowning in memories. I was glad of this, for it numbed the episode a little.The darkness, the closeness of the walls falling over me, the sweet smell of rot… It was like a combination lock. And suddenly I had all the winning numbers.
These elements together managed to do it; they opened the memory like a flower.
Something dormant, something that had happened years before, perhaps when I was very young: four or five years old.
I was looking into the eyes of the bright ocean. The monstrous seagulls wailing above me. If I looked up, I saw nothing, so blinding the white light was. The swimmer travelled methodically, moving away from me. His movements looked precise, automatic. Every couple of strokes his black mouth came out for air. He was moving away from me, away from the rock, where I sat perched like a little bird.
Was that the day that I cut my feet on the rock? The scenes from that outing appeared in my mind mixed up with those from another, one that included Mother and my little brother. Their figures appeared and disappeared from the shore as the memories intertwined. I remembered the sharp pain, and the thin red ribbon of blood in the clear water.
Did I know the swimmer?
The swimmer was my father.
Yes, but did I know him?
I was perched on a rock at the pointy end of the shell-like coquina stone.
To my left, the swimmer.
To my right, the coast stretched for fifty kilometres, curving out on a bay: delicate little shores, abrupt rock formations. At the very end of the curve, the isthmus of Old Town.
If I followed the curve of the coast with my eyes, I could see them, sitting at the end: the two vessels.
It was not a clear image, not really. It flickered in and out of my vision, like a mirage; masses of rock, the town at the point, the isthmus, and at the very end the two gigantic structures: all odd, all hazy, as though I were peering at them through a glass vase, or deep water. It was the rising heat that made them look like the ghosts of two mountains, pale and almost translucent.
The vessels sat quietly there, at the end of the known world, abandoned on the staithe, the whitish skeletons of two enormous beetles. The old white marble cathedral, now the Registry, looked dwarfish at their feet. Their vastness imposed itself on everything, producing a kind of vertigo in the onlooker; I imagined them taking flight as they once did, higher and higher, a heavy cloud crossing the blue sky, upwards, always upwards.
I looked at the vessels, stared at them. My father continued taking his exercise, perhaps doing something more sinister. Was he planning to give himself to the Three Oceans? Was he planning to leave me behind?
Where I sat, on the coquina rock, fifty kilometres separated me from the vessels; fifty kilometres of yellow sand, darker stone, a flat sea that lapped delicately at the shore. The water was the bluest thing I had ever seen, coming and going, a calm receding tide, leaving behind a shiny mirror of darker sand. So pure, so constant, the water on this side of the wall. I wished that this water might wash everything. I wished it could wash me. I wished for my mother and my brother.
To my left, the swimmer. Even now, I have no words to describe him. I can’t say he moved gracefully, or that his huge body splashed water bluntly over the surface as he advanced. I didn’t really know my father. I guess I must have known him at some point, but I don’t anymore, not really. He was soon going to be out of our lives. Was he a good swimmer, a bad swimmer? A believer in giving yourself to the Three Oceans?
All I remember is that I sat, perched on a rock. To my left, the swimmer. To my right, a little beanie girl, her hair dyed blue and a smile of happiness on her face.
There was blood that day: my feet got cut on the stone, its porous edges alive with seashells, little barnacles, the pointy soft skeletons of centuries-old dead crabs. I looked at the red ribbon escaping from my skin: little rubies; red pearls, if such a thing could ever exist. And I cried. Two forces pulling at each other, from opposite places. I was meant to be there; I was not meant to be there. There had been an urgency in my father’s taking me out of bed in the early hours, putting me inside the hovering vehicle still in my sleeping robe, wrapped up in a travel blanket, wrapping me up like a little animal he had found on the road and needed to bring to life, urgently, in secret. ‘Quiet, my little bird,’ he said; for that was what he called me. His little bird, his little blue bird.
For some reason, me and the beanie girl had come alone with my father to Kon-il beach. Was this unusual? Again, I cried.
3
The music continues to wake me sweetly each morning. Melancholy sounds that resemble the shrieks of some creatures, down in Gobarí, but that I know are called ‘stringed instruments’. They accompany the haunted voice that sings alone, to be united with other voices at the end of the song. I look at the little screen displaying the data: Melody title: ‘Ingen vinner frem til den evige ro’. Class: Traditional. Place: Earth, Northern Hemisphere. Epoch: Unknown (Pre-Winter). Translated as ‘No one reaches the eternal calm’. I marvel at the t
ruths contained within this pristine technology.
The interior of my LivePod is white, immaculate. Blue and grey signs that must mean something to the initiated. Little flickering lights here and there, glass lids that open up to small recesses where extra pouches of water magically appear. I grab one, unscrew the little cap, and press the plastic square hard, until all the liquid has passed from the pouch to my body. I have never been this thirsty before. I have nothing to compare it to, since I have never been pregnant before. The skin on my hands is papery, almost translucent. I can discern all the lines that will break into flakes. I have not seen my face in weeks, and my hair has never been this long. It is intricately plaited, but not by me. Someone must have done it while I was unconscious or drugged or asleep. I should feel safe here. Everything is designed for a particular purpose, with a definitive use in mind, exactly as Arlo explained to me. The carefully plaited hair makes sure I do not get the hair tangled with the small indents and recesses inside my pristine coffin.
The forest, on the other hand, was an uncertain space where we made and remade the rules daily. It was filled with plants that could kill us, animals that bared their pointy teeth before springing on you, and the cries and shrieks of so many new things no one could identify them. Why did I feel safer in Gobarí? Why were we brought up there?
There was no beach in Gobarí, no sea, no ocean. The little beach at Kon-il was half a day’s walk away. There was only the pond, where the alicanta lived in his underwater caves. Every week down by the water, Savina left cut-out pieces of fruit, hand-woven baskets filled with gigantic petals, and the petals filled in their turn with miniature sculptures, woven from flowers, mimicking people, trees, and a little house. Tiny decorated pebbles, delicate bone carvings, exquisite quartzite. Dainty offerings, for the basilisk was meant to have a face that resembled a human being, and Savina was scared of it.
The Swimmers Page 2